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Mi-26 Is The World’s Largest Helicopter And It Can Transport Airliners Using It’s Sheer Power

Mi-26 HALO
Lo, and behold, check out the world’s largest Helicopter flying in all its grandeur and magnificence in Mother Russia! Moscow-based Mil Helicopters built the Mi-26, and it started its first operations way back in 1977. The mega machine has roughly the same height as a three-story building, with the wingspan large enough to cover an Airbus A320. This monster of a helicopter has been a stalwart in the ultra-heavy lift industry, and a pair of 11,000 horsepower turboshaft engines are used to power it. The Halo, as it is commonly called, is capable of transporting five-men along with 44,000 pounds of cargo, or roughly 11 family cars at once!

Pic Credits: AP


Just to put things in perspective, The Halo’s power and payload capacity is twice that of the U.S Army’s much hailed CH-47 Chinook helicopter. A lot of time, Halo is compared with the legendary Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport plane, as ac
cording to Avia-Russia, the helicopter’s military versions is capable of carrying as many as 90 combat ready troops, or 63 seated civilians, or even 60 stretchers!

Pic Credits: AP

 

In the picture above, a Mi-26 is transporting a retired Tupolev Tu-134 airliner. You wouldn’t see such sights of sheer power and brute strength anywhere in your country, unless its Russia of course.

Pic Credits: AP

Halo is sometimes used in more dangerous situations and battlefields as well. It has a range of nearly 500 miles, so the Mi-26 has been employed in the past to carry large payloads to inaccessible or unusual places. For example, after the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, a Mi-26 was used to deliver heavy machinery and earth-movers to the remote mountainous valleys to prevent flooding and mudslides.

Okay, a final testimonial to this mad machine’s power. In 1999, a Halo helicopter was used to haul a frozen 23,000-year-old woolly mammoth out of the Siberian tundra. How about that!

Watch the giant during operation in the video below:

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